3 ms·
I completely agree. My original point was that valuable ideas are very difficult to have, and thus scarce. That's why Ricci flow and PageRank are valuable, whi
by michael_nielsen 16y ago
I completely agree. My original point was that valuable ideas are very difficult to have, and thus scarce. That's why Ricci flow and PageRank are valuable, while "let's build a social network to do X", for some choice of X, is not. Difficult-to-have and can-write-on-a-napkin are not mutually exclusive, of course!
- jacobolus 16y agoYou’re right. The difference is just one of definitions. What you call “valuable ideas” are what I call “solutions to really hard problems, developed after years, decades, or sometimes centuries of dedicated work.” What Adams calls “ideas” (e.g. for movie plots) are a completely different animal.